knew immediately that the intensity of the actual explosion indicated the destruction only of the drone, although the shield continued to flash with great sheets and flares of discharge for several seconds afterward. That had probably been the result not just of the explosion itself but the distortion of the shield under that impact. A ton of spacecraft hitting at over a hundred and fifty thousand kilometers a second has a lot of force behind it.
“The main line is in place,” Gheldyn reported.
“I am still getting no water into the pre-chamber,” Valthyrra said. “Have you checked every valve?”
“We checked the valves a final time before I called you.”
“Try it again.” She paused to make a quick check of her operational plans and information on the matter. “Oh hell, each intake chamber has a valve that closes automatically if it detects anything except water coming in. You have to bleed the air from the line at the intake to each generator. There will be a simple manual cock-valve in the end of each line.”
“I am already on my way,” Gheldyn assured her.
“Be sure to start with the big ones. I need all the power I can get.”
“What about the Dreadnought?” Gelrayen asked.
“At least it stopped for a moment to take an accounting of itself,” the ship replied. “I did buy us a little time there. It would have been on top of us already otherwise.”
“Just what did you do to it, anyway?”
“I had the drone ram it,” Valthyrra explained, then turned her camera pod toward the aft image on the main viewscreen. “Another sweep. One last look around for hidden dangers, and here it comes.”
“Valthyrra, you should be getting power now,” Gheldyn told her.
“Yes, the first conversion generator is coming up. And here comes the second.”
Before Valthyrra could do anything with that power, the first discharge beam hit her from behind, connecting squarely on the back of her twin star drives. Unfortunately, she did not have either defensive shields or even her hull integrity shields in place to make some attempt to deal with that wash of tremendous energy; her only protection was the fact that the armored drive doors had been closed. Actual physical damage was limited to simple scoring and burning of the metal. The danger to the Methryn was that the discharge itself was running through her frame and power systems in the form of searing bolts of electrical energy. She brought up her integrity shields first, getting that discharge under control, then engaged her defensive shields at stealth intensity as she accelerated quickly into an evasive path.
“How are we doing?” Gelrayen asked, glancing quickly in Captain Tarrel’s direction. A twenty-two G acceleration had put her out again.
“I, at least, am not doing well,” Valthyrra reported. “Both of my star drives are down. The damage is entirely limited to the power conduits and the main phasing control, but it is nothing that can be repaired quickly and I cannot compensate with redundant systems. My rear battery is down and I have lost almost all ability to scan behind.”
“Can we stay ahead of the Dreadnought long enough for it to lose interest in chasing us?” he asked.
She brought her camera pod closer. “I cannot out-run the Dreadnought in sublight speeds. Indeed, I can only assume that it will lose interest if I can achieve starflight. Commander, I want to try one last stupid idea. It will probably put me down entirely, but it might save this ship and my crew.”
Gelrayen frowned. “I already do not like it.”
“How do you suppose I feel about it?” Valthyrra asked. “I have already overridden the safety lock-outs and I am going to take myself into starflight with my main drives. We do not need to go far. But if I can just get myself past threshold, the Dreadnought will probably break off.”
“We have no choice, do we?”
The lock-out devices that Valthyrra had removed were those intended to prevent feeding too much power to the main drives and burning them out. She knew that she would be damaging herself by this. The drives themselves would probably survive the punishment as long as she did not hold them at this level more than a few minutes; the worst damage would occur after, while they were cooling down. As long as she still had at least one functional drive on each side of the ship, she would still have enough thrust balance to maneuver. But she would never pass threshold if she lost a drive now. The ship began to shake and buck from uneven phasing.
“Coming up on threshold,” Valthyrra reported. “That will be the hardest. Once in starflight, things will smooth out.”
“How are your drives?” Gelrayen asked.
“Doing well. It seems that the Dreadnought cannot target those discharge beams effectively at higher speeds. I have not taken a serious hit since that first time.” She paused. “Ready for transition into starflight. Hold on to something solid, Commander, and kiss Captain Tarrel good-bye. This might be very rough.”
After all of that, her actual transition was not nearly as violent as she had anticipated. The carrier lunged sharply forward for several seconds as it was being pulled, then settled out into fairly smooth starflight.
“We have made it,” Valthyrra reported. “The ship is maintaining extremely low starflight speeds. I will try to hold this for another five minutes and then bring us down. Unfortunately, we might not be underway again any time soon, at least not under our own power.”
“Well, we did survive and even came away knowing more than we did when we started,” Gelrayen said. “I hope that it is worth it.”
“I suppose that it was,” the ship agreed dubiously. “I still wonder about just one thing. Whose stupid idea was all this anyway?”
9
When Captain Janus Tarrel first became aware of the fact that she was still alive, she was forced to approach that discovery with a certain ambivalence. One of the objects of the previous exercise had been to survive, so it had been successful in that regard. At the same time, she wondered how anyone who hurt as much as she did could have lived through it. High G accelerations were an enormously successful form of torture.
She tried to open her eyes and made two important discoveries. The first was the fact that her eyes were curiously unwilling to open. And even when she was able to open them, she was unable to see anything and was given to wonder if they had survived the ordeal. The eyes were very vulnerable to hard accelerations, second only to bad hearts and full bladders, and her own eyes certainly hurt enough. Then she discovered by touch that there were some type of medicated pads over them. She was relieved to discover that she really was not blind, although it did mean that she would have to earn her pension the hard way. No early retirement with benefits for her.
“The medic gave you something for the pain,” a female Starwolf told her.
“It didn’t work,” she insisted. “Who is there?”
“Kayendel. The medicated pads are to keep you from getting black eyes. You have only been out for about half an hour, and the medic said that you can take off the pads when you come around.”
“I don’t want to look. ” Tarrel removed the pads, then discovered that she was doomed to spend the next few moments contemplating a very blurry view of the ceiling. “It was a stupid idea, anyway.”
“What?”
“Coming aboard this ship,” she explained. “Starwolves were specifically made to function under conditions that are deadly to creatures like myself. That should have been a strong warning to me about the advisability of trying to exist in your environment. Who took off my clothes, by the way?”
“Oh, we drew lots for that.”
Ask a stupid question, get no satisfaction. “What are you doing nursing the invalid anyway? Don’t you have duties to attend to?”
Kayendel shrugged both sets of arms. “What good is a helm officer in a ship that has no functional drives? We lost both of the star drives to the Dreadnought there near the end, and Valthyrra was able to get us away into starflight with the main drives. Were you still with us up to that point?”
“That was when I decided to take a nap.”
“There is not much else to tell. Valthyrra knew that she might ruin her main drives by running them past
